On Series S the studio pages spare E-Day data out to the SSD

Gears of War: E-Day is heavy on both Xbox Series X and PC, but on Series S The Coalition kept the image up by leaning on storage. Technical director Kate Rayner told Digital Foundry that data not needed for the current frames is moved to the SSD when system memory runs out.

Series S has 10 GB of RAM and Series X has 16 GB. A normal page file works in a similar way: the overflow sits on disk and comes back slower than from memory, which is how a game starts to stutter.

In E-Day, only data that is not required right now goes to disk. What the frame always needs stays in RAM. If that swap is hit too often, the gain disappears. Combined with dropping Lumen reflections, it was enough for Series S to hold an acceptable image.